LAST EDITED ON Jan-07-11 AT 12:47 PM (EST)
 
>That's good to know. I don't know why, but I've always had kind of a
>hang-up about the characters I work with having proper names, and
>Capcom's often a lot more casual about it, particularly in the old
>days.

Well, you're a writer. It's understandable you'd want to get things right, particularly when dealing with the unfamiliar. I doubt any of us who read your work complain about that attention to detail.

Besides, in prose storytelling, names are important. They're the primary form of identification. In a fighting game, characterisation really comes from visual stuff like the fighter's appearance, moves, so on. Not so important to Capcom, a lot more important to the, ah, fanfiction author.

>Another odd thing about the games' handling of Chun-Li's identity is
>her specified nationality.

Capcom apparently tends to adopt stuff from third party licensed work and flat out fan creations as eventual Street Fighter canon. Perhaps they never intended the Hong Kong thing, but once someone threw it in, it stuck? Or something.

>Mind you, I suppose in WL she could be both. If her father was
>Chan Ka-kui, her mother might well have been Yang Chien-hua
>(particularly since Inspector Chan's previous girlfriend seems -
>prudently, I should say, given what happened to her in the first three
>films - to have dumped him after Police Story 3).

As a point of interest, Chan and Chun are the exact same Chinese family name. It's only a difference in Romanisation. If 'Chun' is a family name, well...it's quite common for parents and kids to have different Romanisations on their official paperwork. In the past this was due to illiteracy or unfamiliarity with the English language. These days it can happen due to the wonders of bureaucracy. I'm very nearly an example of it myself.

Oddly, while the concept of linking Jackie Chan's Police Story character to Chun-Li amuses me immensely, what I really keep flashing back to is the Street Fighter homage scene in City Hunter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Psls1ngwM), which has Jackie in drag as Chun-Li. If that's not proof of a family relationship, I don't know what is.

'course, if Wikipedia's accurate, the official hanzi/kanji used for 'Chun' in 'Chun-Li' isn't a family name but rather a proper given name thing. Mind, I suspect that's more fanon than anything else, even if it's been taken on board by Capcom...and hey, who cares.